MacHg and using Mercurial from the command line

You can use the command line version of Mercurial (via the Terminal)
interchangeably with MacHg. You can freely download and install
whichever version of Mercurial you want on your machine and it will
not conflict with MacHg since an independent copy of Mercurial is
bundled inside the MacHg application. (In fact MacHg does this to
ensure there are no conflicts or other problems with the users
Mercurial configuration.)

To open a Terminal session from MacHg you can choose the menu
item Repository > Open Terminal Here (Or choose the toolbar
item, or the contextual menu item). This will produce something
like the following:

Note in the terminal session you can see the
aliases mhg and chg are being set up. These aliases point to the
version of Mercurial inside MacHg.

mhg

Using mhg you can call mercurial
just like you would normally use hg if you had (or have) installed
the Mercurial tool.

mhg references the Mercurial
binaries inside the MacHg application.

It uses your normal ~/.hgrc configuration you have set up.

chg

Using chg you can call Mercurial in
exactly the same way that MacHg calls Mercurial. That is
chg is just like mhg except it passes the same configuration
settings that MacHg uses.

chg references the Mercurial
binaries inside the MacHg application.

It uses the same HGRC path as the MacHg preferences are set to.
This is ~/Library/Application Support/MacHg/hgrc and optionally it
might also include ~/.hgrc

chg sets the HGPLAIN
environment variable.

Testing

One would mainly use chg in order to
ensure that if you run into problems with MacHg you are then able
to experiment with the commands in the same way MacHg would issue
the command. Eg for testing of connectivity, its important to
ensure that non-interactive login is taking place and thus its
important to call Mercurial in the same way that MacHg will issue
the command.

Permanent Alias

If you want you can simply copy the alias command from the
terminal and put it in your ~/.bashrc or ~/.aliases file. This
makes the alias always available. The Mercurial binary lives inside
the MacHg application, but it is a full and independent version of
Mercurial and MacHg does not need to be running for the terminal to
execute the Mercurial commands.